Weekend Viewing: Make Friends With Elaine May's Mikey And Nicky

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 1, 2012 6:40PM

We are suckers for Elaine May. Not just because of her role in putting Chicago improvisational comedy on the map with Second City forerunner The Compass Players, or for her legendary work with Mike Nichols, or for her prodigious gifts as a writer (from theater to Tootsie to Primary Colors). Or because, even as she turns 80 in a couple of months, she is can still crack us up.

It's because she reminds us of a time when Hollywood was still willing to take big risks on things that were smart, even if they were messy and imperfect. In her own films, May went for broke, having faith in the audience to get the joke or to exercise enough patience to enjoy stories that took would unfold in their own special way. Yes, there was a certain film that Jonathan Rosenbaum has called "the most underappreciated commercial movie of 1987." But there is also the wonderful The Heartbreak Kid. And there is Mikey and Nicky.

May's second film, Mikey and Nicky is not a comedy. It's a unflinching look at two small-time criminals—one is desperately avoiding a hit man, the other trying to stay afloat in the mob that ordered the hit—as they set off into the deepest recesses of a friendship shared since childhood and lose their way. Because it stars the rambling duo of John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, and because it works in an improvisational mode, there are inevitable comparisons to Cassavetes' own films. But May's scathing portrait of male narcissism is perched at a distance that Cassavetes' exploration of this territory often forego, willingly or no, and the view when we take a step back is not pretty.

May had been working on the play which became the movie since 1954, in Chicago. After it was shot, she and the studio fought bitterly when she spent two years editing a hard-to-believe 1.4 million feet of footage. She only got to finish the film by holding two reels of the negative hostage, the story goes. The script and performances are first-rate. Falk and Cassavetes are predictably at ease, and Ned Beatty, Rose Arrick and Carol Grace (the inspiration for Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly) round things out quite nicely. Mikey and Nicky is too-rarely seen, and any fan of 1970s American movies should jump at the chance.

Mikey and Nicky plays Friday, March 2 at 7 p.m. at the Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston.